Archive for May, 2011

Over the last couple of years, some major college programs have had some lapses in ethics, resulting in their programs being stripped of their accomplishments and causing frustration in some, but not all, of their fans. Here are some signs that your favorite college program may be on the wrong path:

– Your starting quarterback has a 401k.

– During every game, the referees wink at him and ask “How was that call, Todd?”

Since Memorial Day is a holiday where a lot of people go see the new summer movies, I thought I would give you a quick guide to help you realize you may have picked the wrong film to check out. Everybody enjoy your holiday! – Warren

Signs You Picked a Bad Summer Movie

– In a major plot point, you’re surprised to find out that vampires are lactose intolerant.

You Should Be Patient

By Warren Arnold

Being patient is hard, but good things happen when you are. Some would call having patience a virtue, but I don’t quite understand why, so I’m patiently awaiting a better explanation.

I do believe it pays off to be patient. Patient people wait in line for the movies, while impatient people cut in with their friends and make you wait longer. But the joke’s on them since it’s a Katherine Heigl movie.

You can take a turkey out of the oven when the little red popper pops, or you can leave it for two more hours to get it crispy and dry, the way I like it. And while this resulted in a nasty family-wide fight which some say ruined Thanksgiving, I like to think it saved us money on Christmas.

You could clean up behind your dog in the park, or you can be patient and wait for it to turn hard and white and attach googily eyes, so that you have another tiny citizen in your scale model of Omaha.

If you’re late for work and lose your car keys, just calm down and be patient, and soon, you won’t have a job to go to.

If you hook a fish in a lake, you could reel it in and eat fish, but if you’re patient and leave it on the line, a bigger fish will eat it, and a bigger fish will eat that fish, and so on until you catch one of those precious whales your dad chose to go save instead of watching you grow up.

You could meet a nice girl at 11PM and go back to her place and have sex, or you can be patient and wait until midnight when she turns eighteen and you don’t violate your parole.

If you’re patient and don’t answer collection calls for your credit card debt, then eventually, they stop calling and come to your house. Then you’ll have a chance to try out your bear traps.

You might buy a monkey and get tired of it’s monkey attitude, but if you’re patient, it will grow up to be a gorilla.

However, it is possible to be too patient.

Like letting someone waste your time by patiently listening to their boring stories without rolling your eyes and yelling “Whatever!”. Even if their boring stories are called baptisms.

You can wait on a bench in the mall while your girlfriend shops, but if you wait too long, then you realize that you don’t have a girlfriend…at least not the one you want.

You can wait for tensions in the middle east to calm down and gas prices to drop, but if you wait too long, then gas is $14 a gallon, because those prices aren’t going down, dummy.

So being patient does pay off, for if you hadn’t patiently taken the time to read through this, then you would have went outside and been mauled by the tiger that escaped from the zoo and is roaming the streets of your town. It should be in the news tomorrow.

It’s me, Warren, or should I say, you. It’s been twenty years and life has changed so much. You have so much life to live and along with that, there will be ups, and of course, downs.

I have some simple things I want to say to you.

Don’t be so hard on yourself. You can’t be perfect all the time and trying to be is a fruitless exercise. Accept what you’re capable of and be at peace with what you’re not.

Who you are now is not who you will be in just a few years. You will gain confidence, girls will like you, and people will listen to you.

High school is not the real world. Yeah, the popular people still act like a-holes until they hit thirty, then they try and forget how horrible they were. But the world is full of people who weren’t popular in high school, and they are the people who have character and integrity. They are the people who you will laugh with, cry with and depend upon in your rough times.

But I’m not letting the popular kids off the hook. Even though my therapist insists that this is just an exercise in self growth, I am hopeful that this will find you on October 25, 1991. Not only is that the date of the homecoming dance but also the day my pants were pulled down in front of the entire high school student body of Franklin, Tennessee, resulting in the nickname “TWiBS”(Tightie Whitey Brown Stripe). As you may have deduced, the purpose of this letter is to defy fate and change our future.

First things first, we must remove some key players from the playing field using my future knowledge and maturity.

Jeremy Kramer: Captain of the football team. Very confident and physically imposing. You must not challenge him directly. His dad is an alcoholic redneck, so leaving a fifth of Jim Beam and Jeremy’s underwhelming report card in their mailbox should result in a sufficiently large domestic dispute to keep Jeremy occupied for the night.

Karrie Parker: She’s the lookout for the pantsing party. Without her, they won’t be able to sneak behind you. As luck would have it, her parents are in the Witness Relocation Program for snitching on the Gambino family and their numbers game. Call Tony Giamatti in Jersey City, NJ and leave an anonymous tip.

How far are you willing to go? If you don’t have the stomach for it, maybe I should contact my sixteen year old self. Did that get you mad? Good.

For the final phase, I’m giving you the greatest gift of all: super strength.

I’ve been experimenting with a mixture of protein shakes, green tea, and cough syrup, and while the results have been promising( I can lift a loveseat all by myself, thank you), I feel like maybe I started a little late in life in order to reach my full potential. Also, I’m curious to see if adding a little bear DNA to the mix would help.

To achieve this, I have drafted a letter to my six year old self instructing him to steal money from our parent’s savings account and strategically invest in the rapidly advancing technology of the early 80’s. I will then send a formula of my own invention to the bright people at Wake Forest University to be developed on the condition that they inject it into my twelve year old self.

With your increased stamina and strength, it shall be you that climbs the social ladder and and becomes a local sports hero. However, you should be careful who you step on on your way to the top, since we don’t want to create a cycle of others sending letters to themselves resulting in us being toppled by the less fortunate.

If for some reason this is a complete failure and high school remains our own personal Vietnam, then you must draft a letter to YOUR fifteen year old self when you reach my age. Keep doing this until we get it right.

I realize that by changing my past, I will cease to exist. In fact, I think my hand is starting to vanish from history as I write this. No, just something in my eye blurring my vision. Sorry, allergy season. I guess it’s more likely that I’ll probably disappear once I finish this or drop it in the mail. I kind of hope not, though, since How To Train Your Dragon is on HBO tonight.